Gilbert J. French

“For monks is what we are, my dear Matthew, monks who enter literature with our heads bowed, as if taking religious orders. It's as simple as that. The poet for whom the subject, the only conceivable subject, is art itself -- and for the true poet, I tell you, there can be no other subject -- such a poet is a monk whose whole life coincides with the adoration of his God and for whom posterity is his Heaven. You' -- he stressed the you -- 'you know what I mean, don't you? The immorality of his soul. For what /is an oeuvre, after all, but the soul of its creator? That's why I chuckle so at the antics of those pathetic buffers in the Academy with their pretensions to immortality. Les Immortels, hah! Maurois, Achard, Druon, Genevoix, that crowd! What a graveyard, Matthew, n'est-ce pas? Dead is what they are, dead, not immortal, dead as writers, mummified as men, propped up in their fauteuils like so many old codgers in wheelchairs. What a farce! Hein? And, you know, you know, it has just occurred to me, it has just this instant occurred to me, that true immortality, the immortality of Racine, of Montaigne, qu'est-ce que j'en sais, of Rimbaud, is to the Immortality of the Académie Française what Heaven is to -- to the Vatican. Hein? For that's what it is, the Academy, the Vatican of French literature.””